In Switzerland, the boring of the longest railway tunnel will be completed

Faido (Switzerland) - The tunneling of the Gotthard railway tunnel between the Swiss cities of Faido and Seidun will be ceremoniously completed on Friday, making it the longest in the world at 57.072 meters. The record was previously held by the Japanese Seikan railway tunnel, which is 53.850 meters long and connects the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido.
The tunneling of the Gotthard railway tunnel, which began in 1999, was originally scheduled for completion in spring 2011, but due to the rapid progress of work, it will be completed this Friday. The last meter and a half of Alpine rock, which the machine nicknamed Sissi will break through live on television shortly after 14:00 CEST, will be symbolically significant but in reality just a small step in the 25 years of planning and construction of the tunnel.
The Gotthard railway tunnel, through which the first trains are expected to pass in 2017, is part of a network of Swiss tunnels, the construction of which is expected to cost around 15 billion euros (approximately 367 billion crowns). The cost of the Gotthard tunnel itself is estimated at 9.83 billion Swiss francs (about 179 billion crowns).
In Switzerland, where the first railway tunnel was built as early as 1882, the Gotthard tunnel represents a unique achievement. The construction was approved by the Swiss in several referendums nearly 20 years ago, and each of them will pay 1,300 dollars (about 22,600 crowns) for it, and it is appreciated by both ecologists and engineers.
Ecologists hope that the tunnel will allow a portion of freight transport to be transferred from roads to rail, thereby relieving the Alpine highways. Two years after the tunnel opens, a limit will be introduced by the Swiss that will restrict the number of trucks allowed to pass through the Alps. It will be 650,000 trucks per year, while currently about 1.2 million trucks pass through the Alps each year.
According to DPA, the tunnel, consisting of two tubes, is considered a small miracle from an engineering perspective. During the tunneling, which involved 400-meter-long drilling rigs with drill heads up to ten meters in diameter, only minimal horizontal and vertical deviations of no more than one centimeter were recorded.
Around 2,500 miners worked on the tunneling, and seven of them lost their lives during construction. Over 13 million cubic meters of rock had to be removed from the tunnel, which in some places is 2,500 meters beneath the summit of Piz Vatgira. This is said to be enough material to fill a freight train that would reach all the way from Zurich to New York. Part of this material will be used to restore Alpine lakes that were dredged for gravel.
Together with all side and connecting tunnels, the underground system has a length of 152 kilometers. After approximately 230 kilometers of tracks are laid, in a few years, about 300 passenger and freight trains will pass through the tunnel daily at speeds of up to 270 kilometers per hour. The journey from Zurich to Milan will then be one hour faster, taking only two hours and 40 minutes.